Jacques-in-the-box

The Paris rumour-mill is churning at full speed this week, fed by the alarming but entirely plausible news that Jacques Chirac is thinking more and more seriously of standing for re-election in a little over two years' time - a few weeks short of his 75th birthday.

According to his closest friends and advisers the French president, having long dismissed with a smile and a cursory wave of the hand any suggestion that he might ever consider running for a third term, is no longer doing so. Instead, he's asking them what they think of the idea.

As Jean-Louis Debré, the speaker of the National Assembly and perhaps the most dedicated of all defenders of the Chirac faith, told Le Monde last week: "These days, when you mention the possibility, he doesn't say much. But he isn't saying 'No' any more."

Another close friend, the writer Denis Tillinac, said the president would "definitely stand again if he's in a position to do so ... The more interesting question, in fact, is who will be the centre-right's candidate in 2012."

Even Mr Chirac's most critical and free-thinking ally, the sharp-witted Francois Bayrou of the centrist UDF party, told L'Express magazine, after spending some time in discussion with the president: "Everything he said suggested he would not be standing again. So for the first time - until now I hadn't believed it - I thought that there was a serious risk of him being a candidate." Much will depend, of course, on the attitude of Mr Chirac's only serious rival, Nicolas Sarkozy, the hyperactive (and hyper-ambitious) former interior and finance minister, who now heads the president's centre-right UMP party. Mr Sarkozy, who turned 50 last week, has so far been careful not to say that he ever would run head-to-head with Mr Chirac for the presidency.

But he has continued to hint that he hopes he will not have to. First off, he would like French presidents to be limited to two terms in office. This was an idea he first floated back in November 2003, but he has frequently repeated it (most recently on a visit to northern France last month, when he said the French people can "no longer stand" the idea of "politicians for life"). Second, he wants the UMP to organise US-style primaries to choose just one presidential candidate, rather than allowing as many would-be centre-right heads of state to run and obliging French voters to sort them out in the first of the election's two rounds.

This, needless to say, is an idea that the Chirac clan detests, partly because it would be a break with the French right's Gaullist traditions and partly because there is every reason to believe that Mr Sarkozy would be the party's choice. Maybe, however, it is an idea the Chirac clan should start considering, if only because the first opinion poll to postulate a head-to-head struggle between the outgoing president and Mr Sarkozy in the first round of the 2007 elections has just predicted that Mr Sarkozy would win by a comfortable eight-point margin.

But it is by no means sure that the relatively young Mr Sarkozy would be prepared to risk splitting the right by mounting a rival campaign. He can, after all, afford to wait, and could reasonably expect that by 2012, at the end of a hypothetical third Chirac term, France's conservatives would welcome him as their favoured candidate with even more enthusiasm and far fewer second thoughts. If Mr Sarkozy does choose to bide his time, the same rumour-mill has it, we could well see him become France's next prime minister. This idea, although both men doubtless dislike it intensely (about as much as they dislike each other), has distinct advantages for both.

For Mr Chirac, it would effectively muzzle Mr Sarkozy by forcing him to pledge his loyalty. It would lumber the younger rival with a very difficult job. Finally, very few on the French right would, in conscience, be able to object to a Chirac-Sarkozy ticket. For Mr Sarkozy, the high-profile post, and the enticing prospect of a daily power struggle with Mr Chirac, would be hard to refuse. There is, of course, just one minor objection to the scheme, but it is one that seems to be foreign to a majority of French voters.

Over the past 25 years, France has had just two presidents. And, as Le Monde calculated last week, if Jacques Chirac does decide to stand again for re-election in 2007, a French voter who is 50 years old today will never have cast his ballot at a presidential election in which Jacques Chirac is not a candidate. That, if nothing else, should give everyone concerned some food for thought.